Your anecdote about getting halfway through a presentation only for some old R&D guy to let you know it has been tried (in front of everyone in the conference room) is stunningly accurate and has happened to me multiple times as an R& D engineer. The most infuriating thing is how it always ends up being your fault for no one keeping reports on R&D projects-- the implication being that you are supposed to hire a PI to see if anyone has already looked into an opportunity before.
Love that you mentioned "culture defining" digital solution. A new fancy tool without anybody in the company willing to use it ultimately dies.
It is definitely super expensive and slow to move a non-digital first company to the modern era, but I definitely see LLMs making that significantly faster. I was literally reading this paper the other day https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.06.14.544984v1.full.pdf and it's impressive how well LLMs are able to take raw input and text and cleanly pipe that into a desired data format.
Great piece. These problems sound familiar! Part of why the PE roll up strategy is an issue is because they always involve massive ERP consolidations which A) always run over budget and are delayed and B) end poorly and make co’s even LESS efficient because they can never get the data layer right. Same thing with CRM.
The root cause holding the industry back from digital (and business) transformation is that their product data is stuck offline. Digitizing this is the first step towards unlocking all of those front-of-house and internal efficiencies you mention.
Spot on with the list of trends within PE owned companies! Though I think my biggest take away was to become the old guy who runs the GC-MS.
Your anecdote about getting halfway through a presentation only for some old R&D guy to let you know it has been tried (in front of everyone in the conference room) is stunningly accurate and has happened to me multiple times as an R& D engineer. The most infuriating thing is how it always ends up being your fault for no one keeping reports on R&D projects-- the implication being that you are supposed to hire a PI to see if anyone has already looked into an opportunity before.
Love that you mentioned "culture defining" digital solution. A new fancy tool without anybody in the company willing to use it ultimately dies.
It is definitely super expensive and slow to move a non-digital first company to the modern era, but I definitely see LLMs making that significantly faster. I was literally reading this paper the other day https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.06.14.544984v1.full.pdf and it's impressive how well LLMs are able to take raw input and text and cleanly pipe that into a desired data format.
Great piece. These problems sound familiar! Part of why the PE roll up strategy is an issue is because they always involve massive ERP consolidations which A) always run over budget and are delayed and B) end poorly and make co’s even LESS efficient because they can never get the data layer right. Same thing with CRM.
The root cause holding the industry back from digital (and business) transformation is that their product data is stuck offline. Digitizing this is the first step towards unlocking all of those front-of-house and internal efficiencies you mention.